Description of problem:
Documentation in KDE Help Center is missing.
Steps to reproduce:
1. Install Mageia 1
2. go to "configure your desktop"
3. hit F1
4. Try viewing documentation for anything besides manpages.
Expected Result:
I expected to see documentation.
Result:
documentation was missing.
How reproducible:
Always.
Thought: if documentation is going to be trimmed, there should be a special package to easily install it again; perhaps this should be part of the standard install/upgrade process.

The workaround is reinstalling the package(s) in question, this time the packages, with all the docs, will be downloaded from the online repositories, e.g. to get the handbook of kopete:
su
urpmi --replacepkgs kopete

IINM, in the Live image the rpms are installed with --excludedocs, or something like that.
There is a bug report in mdv bugzilla about the same topic, it didn't go any where though https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=31639

I'm pretty sure you are correct; --excludedocs would do exactly what is done here. Thanks for the nice workaround.
Of course, not everyone needs the handbooks, but that decision should be the user's. Documentation is pretty important; without it, people can't "RTFM."
splitting the handbooks is certainly an interesting idea.

Splitting the handbooks from every kde package would cause a lot of clutter, too many sub-packages, and since they can't be on the live CD due to space constraints, users will have to install them manually...
Maybe all the handbooks from each KDE .src.rpm can be in one single sub-package, e.g. kdebase4-handbooks, kdebase4-workspace-handbooks... etc; however this being a viable option depends on how big that -handbooks package will be, if it's too big, then a user who just wants the handbook of konsole, wouldn't want to download a big package when the konsole handbook is a small portion of it. (My initial guess is that they would be small in size, since ultimately they're just text files..).
Of course this doesn't fix the issue distro-wide, just for kde packages (which is still an improvement IMHO).